May 22, 2018

The neuron’s threshold and its all-or-none signaling results in almost matches being treated equally downstream in the brain. The Almost Gate lets many inputs over its barrier. Henceforth they are treated the same.

May 20, 2018

Thought trains, sequences of thoughts, are crucial features in how we determine mentally handle our changing environment in satisfying our needs, our desires, and our goals. We think in relatively short chains of thoughts, some connected by logic and some connected by similarity.

January 26, 2018

The Mental Construction model (on the left) displays the levels and relationships that our brain and mind use to handle daily life. Let’s start at the base, 3S Imperatives. Satisfaction of material needs (food, water) and Sexual urges are physical urges originating in the earliest organisms (exhibited in our brainstems) and continue to control broad…

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing. Working memory is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information

The current situation, remembered situations, and 3S imperatives – in their manifestations as emotions, personality traits, goals, desires, and fears – feed into neurons whose outputs lead ultimately to different actions.

The neuron whose Almost Gate is surmounted triggers its action chain. With so many neural inputs streaming from various sources, it’s unsurprising that typically our 3S imperatives are not completely satisfied by our response.

Memory is not a photograph of external reality stored in the brain, but a reconstruction based on observed event, personal emotional impact, and learned relationships.

Consider the Almost Gates that the current situational features go through. Our remembered situations also go through the same path. When there is sufficient matching of results (neural thresholds are surmounted), the situations fit in the same abstract category. Other features of the situations may or may not be comparable.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theory that an individual’s thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks.

The strong version of the hypothesis states that all human thoughts and actions are bound by the restraints of language, and is generally less accepted than the weaker version.

The weaker version says that language only somewhat shapes our thinking and behavior.

Instead of considering linguistic relativism as limiting the possibilities of thought, a better perspective is that language organizes experience in a manner which has yielded useful thoughts and behaviors over the language’s lifespan.

Bayes’ theorem describes the probability of an event, based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. For example, if cancer is related to age, then, using Bayes’ theorem, a person’s age can be used to more accurately assess the probability that they have cancer, compared to the assessment of the probability of cancer made without knowledge of the person’s age.

The mathematical proof technique called “mathematical induction” is deductive and not inductive. Proofs that make use of mathematical induction typically take the following form:

Property P is true of the natural number 0.
For all natural numbers n, if P holds of n then P also holds of n + 1.
Therefore, P is true of all natural numbers.

When such a proof is given by a mathematician, and when all the premises are true, then the conclusion follows necessarily. Therefore, such an inductive argument is deductive. It is deductively sound, too.

“… the cortex works as a rule-extraction machine and produces maps of input according to the principles of frequency and simularity.” Spitzer (p 138).
Spitzer, Manfred. The Mind Within the Net. Models of Learning, Thinking, and Acting. The MIT Press, 1999. Print. ISBN 0-262-69236-8

[M]emory is not entirely faithful. When you perceive an object, groups of neurons in different parts of your brain process the information about its shape, colour, smell, sound, and so on. Your brain then draws connections among these different groups of neurons, and these relationships constitute your perception of the object. Subsequently, whenever you want to remember the object, you must reconstruct these relationships. The parallel processing that your cortex does for this purpose, however, can alter your memory of the object. McGill Memory and Learning

Spitzer, Manfred. The Mind Within the Net. Models of Learning, Thinking, and Acting. The MIT Press, 1999. Print. ISBN 0-262-69236-8

Zeman, Adam. A Portrait on the Brain. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008. Print. ISBN 978-0-300-11416-4.